As more enterprises and private consumers shift toward cloud-based networking for communication and data manipulation, challenges arise due to an increasing amount of bad parties seeking to access, without authorization, information stored in cloud-based networks. Such information may include sensitive data being shared such as work-related documents or the names of the parties communicating with each other and the organizations/enterprises that the parties belong to. Parties communicating via a cloud-based network may not want unauthorized parties to know their identities due to privacy concerns. This may be due to the fact that inferences can be made if an unauthorized party is aware of the identities of parties in communication with each other via a cloud-based network. Such inferences may be reinforced when data regarding the amount and duration of communications between the parties is known in addition to the identities of the parties.
A component or a feature that is common to more than one drawing is indicated with the same reference number in each of the drawings.